Big Al's truth hurts, and our leaders can't handle the truth

Independent Weekly
Saturday 23/9/2006, Page: 11

One thing about terrorism: it's out there. We know about it. We are appalled that thugs could so pervert a religion that the inadequate are prepared to kill themselves as long as they please their indoctrinators and kill others as well.

So the threatened world instinctively decided to fight it at any level we can think of. We've rushed to an ill-considered war. We've made airline travel tedious. We've allowed our governments to eat away at the laws and rights we have developed over a couple of thousand years to help us live together. We've moved our borders. We've even tried to work out what our values are. And we have spent countless millions of dollars. We have, it is clear, taken terrorism very seriously indeed.

Yet terrorism is not the biggest danger we face. For much of the world, nothing has changed. More people die on our angry roads than from the bombs and hatred of terrorism.

Our greatest danger by far is the damage our way of life is inflicting on our now surprisingly fragile planet. It is global warming, climate change, call it what you like, but the way we are going we could blow the whole game away within a couple of generations.

Yet where is the fuss? Where is the steely-eyed determination to fight back? Where are the millions of dollars we should be spending? True, we talk about strange things like Ecologically Sustainable Development and washing machines and refrigerators in the stores have funny stars stuck on them.

Some odd people have cars that somehow partly work with electric motors, but they are probably as worried about the price of petrol as saving the world. A few wind farms are popping up, but many people complain about what they look like. They certainly look better than the tide sweeping in over the coastal suburbs.

Australia has a special status in this. Per head of population, we're one of the biggest polluters of all. We're addicted to our bountiful strata of coal - rich, black and ready to spew carbon dioxide into the air.

We've said: Blow the cost to the world, we're looking after our economy. A strong economy will not do us much good if droughts, floods and hurricanes make it impossible to live.

Go and see Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. The "truth" is that the world is quickly being heated out of control. It is compelling stuff. There are one or two little American indulgences, but mainly this is a lecture with facts that no one has yet knocked down.

Most damning of all is a chart, courtesy of studies of layers of the Antarctic ice, of the world's temperatures going back more than 600,000 years. It shows behaviour in the past 10 years that has never happened before. It points to some 200 million people forced to be refugees within the lifetime of many of us.

Yet our Federal Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane offers the doltish view that he's not interested in the opinion of a failed candidate for the US presidency. And John Howard and Kim Beazley live in another, if temporary, world.

That failed candidacy is a monstrous loss.

Gore the man everyone thought was dull, has made this campaign a passion. It is inconceivable that he would not have stood up to Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Coal, Big Power Utilities and all the other entrenched Big lobbies that are leading our charge to oblivion.

Instead, the US and the world got George W Bush, who took America into war and helped it ratchet up to about a third of the world's contribution to global warming.

Gore is not defeated by this. He reckons we have the wit and resources to save ourselves. We've beaten the hole in the ozone and acid rain. But he thinks we have only about 10 years to steady things down.

It's a good feeling that South Australia seems to be the most determined state to fight for the future. Two-metre high wind turbines on government buildings is a great idea. It would be better if they were compulsory for every dwelling. They're only about $13,000 each and Australia has spent greater amounts on much more frivolous things.

But when the states tried to come together to shame John Howard's apathy, it was instructive to see how quickly the resource states, Queensland and Western Australia, slid away.

Alan Carpenter, Peter Beattie, Howard, Beazley and the economy ridden Minister Macfarlane should take an afternoon off and see An Inconvenient Truth. It might just break the drought.